Don’t sell the booming American economy short just yet — 2019 is shaping up to be another year of solid growth as President Trump’s new trade deals begin to take effect.

Despite the fact that economic growth continued to accelerate in 2018, some pessimists and partisans still stubbornly refuse to believe in the ongoing economic miracle, and are predicting that a recession is just around the corner. They’re dead wrong, because Donald Trump has been laying the groundwork for this year’s prosperity since he took office.

A surge in business and consumer confidence — buoyed by the president’s repeal of job-killing regulations — fueled growth in 2017, and the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was the main factor that pushed growth past 3 percent in 2018. In 2019, the key driver of economic growth will be international trade.

For decades, our economy was shackled by outdated trade deals that put American workers at a clear disadvantage, while successive U.S. presidents from Clinton to Obama flagrantly abdicated their responsibility to challenge China’s illegal trade manipulation.

As a result, countless thousands of American jobs were shipped overseas, especially in the manufacturing sector. President Trump, however, has changed all that with his bold strategy of using targeted counter-tariffs to persuade our trade partners to give up their artificial advantages.

That approach has been particularly effective when it comes to China, which is not only the worst offender, but also the country that is perhaps most vulnerable to retaliation.

For years, China has ruthlessly pursued unfair economic strategies, such as industrial subsidies and high tariffs on U.S. goods, to stifle American competition and bolster its own industries. To make matters worse, Beijing has systematically stolen technology from American companies, leading the White House to estimate recently that China’s theft of intellectual property has put 44 million American technology jobs at risk.

Shortly after the White House announced retaliatory tariffs against the Communist regime, however, China’s leaders began to panic, realizing that their economy cannot sustain a long-term trade war with the U.S.

In November, President Trump agreed to a 90-day tariff truce following talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and within days Beijing slashed tariffs on American-made cars by 25 percent — a major victory for the U.S. that exposed China’s underlying economic weakness.

President Trump also succeeded in replacing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has been an unmitigated disaster for the U.S. economy ever since it took effect in 1994.

Even in its largely positive report about NAFTA, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) conceded that the U.S.-Mexico trade balance “swung from a $1.7 billion U.S. surplus in 1993 to a $54 billion deficit by 2014.”

“Many workers and labor leaders point to these numbers to blame trade, including NAFTA, for the decline in U.S. manufacturing jobs,” CFR continued. “The U.S. auto sector lost some 350,000 jobs since 1994 — a third of the industry — while Mexican auto sector employment spiked from 120,000 to 550,000 workers.”

Clearly, Donald Trump did the country a favor by tearing up NAFTA. Rather than simply abandoning the ideal of free trade, though, the president gave Mexico and Canada a taste of the trade barriers America has been swallowing for a quarter-century, showing them that trading with the U.S. on equal terms serves their interests better than a trade war.

Government officials in both countries initially blanched at the prospect, but eventually they recognized that the new United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) is far preferable to no deal at all.

“USMCA is a great deal for all three countries, solves the many deficiencies and mistakes in NAFTA, greatly opens markets to our farmers and manufacturers, reduces trade barriers to the U.S. and will bring all three great nations together in competition with the rest of the world,” President Trump boasted after finalizing the new agreement.

The president is also renegotiating unfair trade deals with other partners like Japan, South Korea, and the European Union.

Significantly, the benefits of these new deals haven’t even been realized in our economy yet. Together with a new trade deal with China, there’s no stopping the Trump economic boom. Our ongoing economic renaissance is only beginning to bloom — in 2019, America’s economy will be bigger, stronger, and more secure thanks to President Trump’s bold and transformative trade policies.

Herman Cain is former CEO of the National Restaurant Association and a 2012 presidential candidate.

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